3.18.2015

Love the likes of X-COM, Oregon Trail and roadtrips across a ruined American landscape? Then join us Wednesday, April 1st, at 7:00PM at Austin’s North Door as JUEGOS RANCHEROS presents the local debut of Overland, the forthcoming tactical survival game from Austin’s own Finji.

Just back from a critically acclaimed first showing at San Francisco’s Game Developers Conference, Finji will be giving Austin an early opportunity to play the game, in which “players scavenge fuel and other supplies as they head directly into the heart of a cataclysm” which has produced “a hardly-recognizable America.”

As part of the event, members of the development team — which include Austin locals Adam Saltsman, Shay Pierce & Jocelyn Reyes, in addition to LA’s Heather Penn — will give a short presentation on both the influences & design goals of the game, in advance of its desktop/tablet release later this year.

Overland will be playable Wednesday, April 1st, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public, so come join us as we drink, play and meet the people changing the way we think about games!

12.17.2014

Every month, as part of the regular monthly meetings of the Austin, TX independent game community JUEGOS RANCHEROS, we do a very casual & chatty rundown of the ten or so games from the previous month for the audience, to give people — especially those outside the indie community itself — a look at what they may have missed. The featured games are both local and global, and both indie and, on occasion, a bit-bigger-budget — what binds them together is simply that they’re all amazing.

While they’re still remaining tight-lipped on the actual gameplay, Funomena says Wattam — a combination of the Tamil and Japanese words for “making a loop” — provides a hint to what the game will be about, “making connections between different types of things.”

Above is the first trailer for the game just revealed at the PlayStation Experience event, which introduces Wattam‘s main-character mayor, with more details expected to trickle out throughout 2015, all of which you’ll obviously probably be seeing here.

11.7.2014

Every month, as part of the regular monthly meetings of the Austin, TX independent game community JUEGOS RANCHEROS, we do a very casual & chatty rundown of the ten or so games from the previous month for the audience, to give people — especially those outside the indie community itself — a look at what they may have missed. The featured games are both local and global, and both indie and, on occasion, a bit-bigger-budget — what binds them together is simply that they’re all amazing.

9.29.2014

Want to spend your Thursday night wrestling a pitbull to the ground & high-fiving a pizza as you lose yourself in a ‘giddy apocalypse’? Then come join us this Thursday, October 2nd, at 7:00PM at Austin’s North Door as we present the local double-feature premiere of Kevin Cancienne’s local multiplayer dog-em-up Dog Park & Jane Friedhoff’s Slam City Oracles.

Developer Cancienne — also known for his design work on area/code’s early classic iPhone puzzle game Drop7 — has described Dog Park as “a fighting game without the fighting”, a four-’person’ brawler where players choose their dog & score points for chasing, wrestling, cavorting & gamboling in perfectly-pitched canine fashion.

Various JUEGOS RANCHEROS organizers have also described it as “omg the best game ever”.

Already drawing a number of favorable comparisons to Katamari Damacyfrom sites like Kotaku for its cheerfully chaotic cartoony slapstick physicality, Oracles is a vertically-oriented game where two girls have four minutes to joyfully & wantonly break the entire world around them.

Both games were commissioned for the NYU Game Center’s No Quarter exhibition — the yearly local-multiplayer focused show which has spawned games like Nidhogg, Bara Bari Ball & Bennett Foddy’s Speed Chess — and were first debuted there September 19th, alongside Naomi Clark‘s consensual card game Consentacle and Corporate Vandals, a physical game from Shawn Allen, creator of Treachery in Beatdown City.

Both games will be making their local debut Thursday, October 2nd, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public, so come join us as we drink, play and meet the people changing the way we think about games!

8.25.2014

If you thought the Adventure Time Game Jam was going to be hard to top, we might just have done it: organizers of Fantastic Arcade have just announced the Barfcade Game Jam, a two-week jam open to developers world wide to create a ton of two-player head-to-head games based on food, cooking, eating and (obviously) barfing.

Why barf and why now? Fantastic Arcade’s special guest this year will be Thu Tran, frequent Babycastles collaborator and creator of the super amazing cooking/puppet show Food Party (above) and its MTV2 followup Late Night Munchies.

Thu will be providing the special secret ingredient required in all the jam games, which will be announced just before the jam begins on Saturday, August 30th, and will be co-hosting the Barfcade proper, a live game-show event held on September 21st that will be streamed for the rest of the world to see on Venus Patrol’s Twitch channel.

Games for the jam are meant to be fast, competitive, and no longer than 30 seconds each — the best of these will be strung together for the Barfcade event, giving the live competition a sort of head-to-head WarioWare vibe. Canabalt creator Adam Saltsman has created a brand new example game (pictured above), which you can play at the Barfcade website to get a sense of where to head!

The jam will run Saturday, August 30th through Sunday, September 14th — more details are available at the Barfcade site, which will be where you can also find the secret ingredient at launch. Can’t wait to see what you come up with!

8.13.2014

Every month, as part of the regular monthly meetings of the Austin, TX independent game community JUEGOS RANCHEROS, we do a very casual & chatty rundown of the ten or so games from the previous month for the audience, to give people — especially those outside the indie community itself — a look at what they may have missed. The featured games are both local and global, and both indie and, on occasion, a bit-bigger-budget — what binds them together is simply that they’re all amazing.

8.11.2014

Originally pitched as a physics-based toy that let you “play with the creatures and artifacts of North American mythology”, Ben Esposito’s Kachina quickly became one of my most anticipated games back in 2012, with its vaguely Katamari-in-reverse mechanics that allowed you to swallow up successively larger objects with a player-controlled hole that grew wider every time something fell in.

After its showing at various festivals throughout 2013, including last year’s HORIZON conference, news about the game went somewhat dark, as Esposito simultaneously continued development on Perfect Stride — the first-person skateboarder he’s creating with LA game collective Arcane Kids — as well as that collective’s numerous side projects like the cult hit Bubsy 3D.

8.11.2014

After another couple long weekends spent with a few hundred excellent games, the first eight selections of this year’s Fantastic Arcade have just been announced, each of which will be given the full arcade-cabinet overhaul (as above, from last year) and put on public display for all Fantastic Fest & Arcade-goers in Austin, TX from September 18th to 21st.

Once again, the games have been selected by the operators of Austin indie collective JUEGOS RANCHEROS (aka Adam Saltsman, Jo Lammert, Rachel Weil, Wiley Wiggins & yours truly), with some of those games also serving as public tournaments throughout the festival’s five days — full information on each follows below.

Banana Chalice

Developer: Kyle Reimergarten

The next major game from Kyle Reimergarten — creator of Fantastic Arcade 2013 selection (and one of my overall top 2013 games), Fjords — Banana Chalice is a tunnel shooter about cats, bananas and monsters, with all of the off-kilter and lo-fi home-spun charm that by now has become his signature. Reimergarten promises as much mystery and magic out of Chalice as he brought to Fjords, which is to say, a lot.